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BREAKING NEWS | |
U.N. CLIMATE SCIENTIST SAYS HURRICANE SANDY WAS NO FLUKE STORM
November 28, 2012
 Prof Jean-Pascal van Ypersele , Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Photo source, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele.
(INTERNATIONAL) -- Those who think the “Katrina of New Jersey” was just some fluke big storm have another think coming, according to the U.N. climate panel's No. 2 scientist.
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said it’s tricky to try and pin a single weather event on climate change, but added in an interview with The Associated Press at the U.N. climate negotiations in Qatar that Hurricane Sandy was "probably not a coincidence" but an example of the extreme weather events we are likely to see more often here in the U.S. as the world gets warmer.
He also says that as people experience stronger and more frequent heat waves and storms as they become part of everyday life, people will stop asking whether global warming is real.
Heat trapping gases - emissions of such things as carbon dioxide primarily from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil - have increased by 20 percent just since 2000, according to a U.N. report released last week.
Those gases contribute to global warming which in turn is slowly melting the ice sheets at the poles and starting to raise sea levels.
Scientists say an increase in sea levels will contribute to more deadly and devastating storms such as Sandy because storm surges, which do so much damage to structure along coastlines, now begin at a higher level of the sea.
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